Mysorean

25th July 2008, Hotel Leela Palace, Bangalore, 3.00PM
I was there attending a conference when my colleague flashed the screen of his blackberry at me which had breaking news from BBC: “Bangalore, IT Capital of India, rocked by serial bomb blasts”

I was not so sure about what to do next if at all anything was necessary to be done. So, I just backed out of the conference called my wife and told her that I was fine and sat down for a few minutes trying to get more information about the blasts. Called up a friend who told me that there was one at Sarjapur Road. I was staying 100m from there at my friend’s place. My friends still stay there - I mean it is their permanent house as they say in this part of the World. Let’s assume these terrorists had planned these blasts a day before, I would be one person gone for sure as I was walking around that place the previous day.

Anyway, once I made my important calls, I called for my taxi and headed for the airport. I had a flight to catch at 1925 hours. And here I was at 1600 hours in my taxi driving towards the airport. It was a strange feeling. Though I had reassured myself that my friends and family were all safe, I was still fleeing. A couple of idiots planned a series of bomb blasts and killed a person and injured around 20 and affected the daily life of cowards like me. I felt really wretched during my drive back to the airport from the hotel. Here I was in a city a few minutes ago and was happy and suddenly I am leaving it and going away as if I had nothing to do with it. That felt strange.

Not only am I doing nothing about the current pathetic security situation in our country, neither do I have any idea of what is to be done to make the whole situation better. And that’s what really frustrates me. Even if I set out to do something, it is immediately brought to my notice that ‘one man can do nothing’. Yeah, that’s right, so why doesn’t anyone connect with me and we could do something about it. Now the logic is that: Terrorism is not something you can stop by a group of people wanting to do something.

The problem is that the enemy is not clearly defined. Some of my friends with whom I discussed this felt that we must address poverty and other issues before dealing with terrorism. I was in disagreement with that thought process. You can’t wait to uproot poverty before tackling terrorism. Terrorists will uproot humanity by then and thinking on those lines it won’t be long before they come to a stage when they kill each other and end the human race once and for all. Going by one estimate the World has another 500 years maximum to see human beings alive. The rate at which we are going, even 200 seems a realistic estimate! And I don’t think we would have uprooted poverty by then atleast as much as I would love to see a poverty-free world. So, let’s deal with terrorism at a level that we can actually deal with during our lifetime!

First of all, the idea that terrorism is a result of poverty is not entirely ridiculous but borders on that somewhere. Poverty is used as a hook to get people ‘execute’ the bomb blasts. ‘Execute’ as in place bombs, arrange for vehicles and accommodation, etc. The poor guy does not provide all this, he arranges for all this by coordinating with concerned parties as he is a localite and is trusted. So, these guys are just pawns in a bigger game. The game has been strategized by someone who is not poor for sure, who is not uneducated for sure and who is not technically dumb for sure. So, the real enemy is this. The brain behind the whole event. This brain is rich, educated and tech-savy. And the brain is globally present with its tentacles spread into every single locality of every city.

So, our first step should be to make sure that we get across to tracking these brains. It is very clear that the majority of them belong to a certain creed. These brains need to be tracked and their funding arms need to be cut off. Finding this is probably the toughest part. But I really hope someone is doing this. I have watched a BBC program where they once showed how the Interpol was tracking suspects of something that was about to happen. And when it happened on July 7th they could not avoid it but within days they got across to the guys who actually did it, the brains behind it and the financial channels too. I guess as Indians, we need to help our police in tracking suspicious candidates.

If we are only bothered about me, myself and my family, like I did by running to the airport in the shortest possible route and time, then I think I need to change. And I saw a lot of people do the same along with me and would assume that we would call it very ‘natural’ to do that. Okay, but then from wherever we stay we need to resolve to do something about the degrading state of security of human lives in our country. We need to fight the bad intelligence with good intelligence. Finally it all comes down to bad versus the good. Unfortunately, when the good ones sleeep, only bad seems to prevail. If these blasts don’t wake us up, I shudder to think about the next alarm!